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The Endowment Diary

The Endowment Diary

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The Endowment Mis-selling Debacle - one of the UK's worst financial scandals

Monday, August 14, 2006

Shabby Abbey

Shabby Abbey

Abbey is reportedly still struggling to address and satisfy its endowments problems, some 15 months after Abbey was fined £800K by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for its poor performance in handling endowment mortgage mis-selling complaints.

According to reports, endowment complaints companies say that paperwork frequently goes missing at Abbey and that their clients are waiting months for a decision from Abbey about their cases.

Keypoint Endowment Claims allege that it has 500 Abbey clients who have all been waiting over 8 weeks for a decision from Abbey. In fact the majority have waited over 3 months.

The FSA rules stipulate that endowment providers must decide whether to uphold or reject a mis-selling complaint within 8 weeks. In the event that they cannot stick to this deadline, they must send a holding letter to complainants. Failure to do this is a breach of the FSA rules, and risks disciplinary action.

John Gardiner, operations director at Keypoint, is quoted as saying:

"Abbey is by far the slowest, most disorganised and inflexible endowment company we deal with.

In more than half of the 500 outstanding cases I have with Abbey, the bank hasn't even sent a holding letter."

Abbey is owned by Banco Santander, and was fined £800K last year and ordered to reopen 50,000 mis-selling cases that it had previously rejected.

I repeat, much of this pain and mess could all be stopped if the life assurance companies bit the bullet and underwrote these useless products that we have been lumbered with.